As Republican nominee Donald Trump prepares to give a major speech on his immigration policy on Wednesday, the number of undocumented immigrants deported by President Barack Obama is set to hit a 10-year low this year, The Hill reports.
By the end of the fiscal year next month, official estimates are that some 230,000 people will be deported from the U.S, slightly less than the 235,413 removed from the country in 2015, which itself was the lowest figure since 2006, according to The Hill.
Just four years ago, almost 410,000 people were deported in a single year, the highest number during the Obama administration.
But ironically, as ABC News points out, while Trump has garnered most of the attention with his rhetoric to deport as many as 11 million illegal immigrants if elected, it is Obama who has thrown out of the country more people than any other president ever.
In fact, the more than 2.5 million people who have been deported during the Obama administration through 2015 is more than all the presidents of the 20th century combined.
Adding to the irony is that while Trump has recently emphasized his desire to specifically go after criminal elements among the illegal immigrants as a first priority, that is exactly what Obama has been doing, ABC News reports.
In his November 2014 executive order, Obama directed personnel to focus on deporting criminal, not families, among the illegal immigrants, and, in fact, in fiscal year 2015, although the total number of deportations were down from the previous year, a rising percentage of those who were thrown out had previously been convicted of a crime, with some estimates as high as 91 percent.
The Daily Caller points out that if Trump's latest statements can be taken as the most likely to reflect his policy, which would be to mainly go after those illegal immigrants who have been convicted of felonies or crimes defined as serious misdemeanors, that would result in a total of some 690,000 being deported out of the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in the country, or far less than the total the Obama administration has managed to deport.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.